Of Interest

What’s the first thing you do when you show up for work at Hopkins Hall this morning? Check EphBlog of course!

See here for previous discussions of our readership. The buttons at the bottom of the right panel provide links to the two (here and here) services that we use. Here is a current report from Google Analytics. (I am no expert in what this report means, nor can I figure out a way to allow public access to the underlying data. Sorry!)

My conclusions (informed commentary is welcome!):

1) Readership is up. I sometimes think that the max possible total daily audience is about 2000. How many people in the world care about Williams as much as we do?

2) Almost a 1/3 of readers are from the College or local community. (I believe that rr.com is the old ATT&T Road Runner service, a major cable provider in the Williamstown area.)

3) At least a third of readers are come to EphBlog on random searches, sometimes finding what they want, sometimes not.

4) The remainder are regular readers from outside the Williamstown area. I assume that almost all of these are alumni and parents.

Related posts:

10 Responses to “Hello Williams College!”

Ronit says:

I wouldn’t go by that graph at all. rr.com (Road Runner) is a major cable provider in NYC.

According to Google Analytics, a little over 15% of our total visits come from the Williamstown-North Adams area. The second highest concentration of EphBlog readers is in New York City, which accounts for 11% of total readers. Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Washington, Arlington, and Philadelphia combined send about as many readers as NYC. We reached readers in 107 different countries in the last month.

State by state (as a percentage of total global readership):
Massachusetts – 29.65%
New York – 15.52%
California – 6%
Pennsylvania – 3.64%
District of Columbia – 3.61%

I trust these numbers more than Sitemeter, because they are based on cookies rather than IP addresses (Sitemeter does not reliably track unique readers).

Max and average daily viewership are about the same (so we’re very consistent) – around 1,100 visits/day (not unique visitors). The maximum number of unique visitors in a single day in the last month was 725 – average is between 600 and 700 visitors.

Ronit: Interesting. Perhaps I have been overestimating the percentage of campus/local readers and it is closer to 20% than 1/3? I guess it depends on how many readers we have in neighboring towns besides North Adams and Williamstown.

For those wanting more detail, here is the readership trend from Williamstown over the last year. This data certainly looks plausible since readership goes down so much during the summer and school vacation. This might suggest that a large majority (75%? more?) of our campus readers are students.

Dick: As Ronit notes, SiteMeter (the source for that image) may not be the most reliable source. Also, I think that image might be for just the last 100 or so readers. So, the 1% could just be you.

Thanks for the clarifications Ronit (perhaps the main post could be updated/edit with some of that info?)

I love Google Analytics – tidbits that were interesting to me:

(1) Speak Up! is a huge success (shown on the analytics sheet as I think as the /ephwall/ item I think). It’s the second most-viewed page.

(2) There are lots of Erin Burnett-obsessed people out there (third most-viewed page is the Erin Burnett category page).

(3) Quite a few prospective Ephs or Eph-parents are probably reading EphBlog – there seemed to be a jump in unique visitors after/around admissions decisions time and searching for “williams morty visiting snacks” was one of the top key word searches leading to EphBlog. Given that Admissions seems to push that concept, it is most likely connected to admitted and/or prospective students.

Maybe it goes down in part in the summer because some of those readers are parents of current Ephs and may be less likely to check in when the students aren’t in school (especially if the student is at home with them or is somewhere else that can be followed online). Also even hard-core alumni readers may well not follow the blog during their vacations, and many people vacation in the summer. Anyway, it’s hard to generalize accurately.

^^^Let’s say you wanted to begin to build Big Brother– a system which could, in real time, monitor human events ranging from the publication of opinion, to correspondence, to even the spread of disease…

Year-to-date, there have been 83,235 visits. (I think each “visit” is defined as a unique IP address, counted no more than once a day.

1) 10,282 from Williamstown, 4,175 from North Adams, 990 from Chicopee, 629 from Rowley and smaller numbers from other western Massachusetts towns. So, as a percentage of visits (many/most of whom are the same person visiting on more than 1 day), about 20% of our visits are from local students, faculty, staff and residents. So, I think that my previous estimate of “almost 1/3” is too high.

2) Here is an estimate of loyalty from Google, again for year-to-date. I do not know the right way to interpret it, but my sense is that we can divide the readership into two halves: Those that just come across EphBlog via random surfing (slightly less than 1/2) and those that return regularly. Whether 8 visits or 25 or 50 counts as “regular” depends on your point of view.

If we assume that 20% of all readers are locals (as above), then the remaining 30% (call it 1/3?) of regular readers would be alumni, parents and others with a great interest in All Things Eph who live elsewhere. Then, about 1/2 of our readers would be just random surfers.

3) Needless to say, there are endless complexity in this data and I may have made some major mistakes, but, as best I can tell, in a typical day EphBlog gets about 1,000 readers (more recently): 200 from the school (mostly students/faculty/staff), 300 from outside (mostly parents and alumni) and 500 from the world (mostly people interested in Erin Burnett or Katie Couric).

Whether that is impressive or pathetic depends on your point of view.

4) My own preferred metric — which I can’t figure out how to calculate from Google Analytics — would try to determine the number of regular readers, defined as people who check EphBlog on more than 5 days out of the month. This is at least 500 (if the same 500 regular readers come by every day) but could be as much (?) as 2,000. My guess is about 1,000.